How the blockchain will break up Big Tech

The bottom line: Moving identity on-chain, and thereby removing the possibility of users-table-centric network effects, completely up-ends the entire landscape of API-based, access-controlled interoperability that the present Internet is built on. All of the non-technical market and political dynamics around users table size, leverage, and risk sud... See more

Eventually, there will be a blockchain users table that's bigger than the next two or three proprietary users tables combined. When that happens, the megaplatforms will either ditch their proprietary tables and reconfigure their businesses around the chain, or they'll enter a doom loop.

At some point, though, the blockchain users table (plus the ecosystem built on it) will grow to the size where incumbents can't compete on their own. When BitClout's virtual users table has surpassed, say, Twitter's proprietary users table in size, then Twitter will either join the blockchain or get left behind. And likewise on up the size leaderbo... See more

All of the big incumbents will want to keep their users tables proprietary in the beginning, because that's their moat and it gives them the network effects and lock-in that markets and investors reward them for.

Every company that builds on the same virtual users table has immediate access to the network effects of every other startup on that table. Every time an on-chain company onboards a new user, then your service has a new user, as well. (In a manner of speaking. They may not be actively using your service yet, but they effectively have an account on ... See more

So with BitClout, I have an identity on that blockchain that's publicly accessible to anyone running an open-source BitClout node. To continue with the example of LinkedIn, if they were to rebuild themselves on top of BitClout, and they were to write their entire users table along with all its endorsements to the BitClout blockchain, then that data... See more

In the present incarnation of the web, all these separate users tables enforce a specific kind of interoperability architecture even on apps that want to be fairly open with their own user data. Specifically, everyone's proprietary user data sits behind an API that any third-party app has to call if it wants access.

This being the case, the size of this table is a direct measure of the size of a tech platform. It's not a proxy measure, either.

So the entire online attention economy is built around proprietary users tables that different apps jealously guard and are constantly trying to grow.